


the shadow of your shadow

by Verbyna



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Jack Zimmermann's Overdose, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 08:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15020984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Jack Zimmermann dies before the draft. Jeff holds Kent together, more or less, through their first year in the NHL.





	the shadow of your shadow

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to summerfrost and blithelybonny for the hand-holding and editing help! title from jacques brel. mind the tags, pals, and drop me a message here or on tumblr (soundslikepenance) if you'd like more info on triggers before you read.

When Jack Zimmermann dies, all the obits are about his parents.

Jeff’s dad and stepmom call him. They say they’re worried about Jeff, and somehow that makes it worse than if they hadn’t called at all. They didn’t seem worried for him when he was signing his contract this week, before the news officially broke.

He wonders if Jack’s parents knew how to talk about it. If anyone said, _Vegas will be a lot, son. It’s okay if it’s a lot._

Jeff watched Kent Parson being drafted first and was too worried about where he’d end up himself to really look at Parson’s face or think about why Jack Zimmermann wasn’t in the room.

On the phone, his dad says, “They shouldn’t have given him pills.”

His stepmom says, “It’s okay to be nervous about meeting your new teammates. Just act cool.” That’s her advice for everything, though. She’s twenty-four.

 

*

 

Kent Parson arrives in Vegas the day after Jeff gets there. They’re both staying with Channing Searle (“Call me Scraps!”), who’s not much older than them, but veterans are pretty thin on the ground.

Jeff figures out it’s more of a roommates situation than mentorship when Scraps asks Jeff to drive his bigass truck from the airport so Scraps can finish texting his girlfriend.

“What’s her name?” Jeff asks, acting cool.

“Mia,” Scraps says. “She’s local!”

He talks about her all the way to his apartment. And about Vegas, which he loves, mostly because he’s so in love with this girl that Jeff is sort of embarrassed to witness it. It’s hard not to like Scraps, though. He treats Jeff like they’ve known each other since bantam.

The apartment isn’t much to write home about, so Jeff doesn’t. It’s close to the arena. He picks the bedroom next to Scraps’ and starts unpacking as soon as they get in, then they eat pizza and watch _Titanic_ because that’s what was on TV.

He dreams about running. In the morning, he does, even if it takes him twenty minutes to put his fucking shoes on.

Jeff doesn’t really think about how Jack Zimmermann was supposed to live next door. The dead, Jeff knows, never move from where they last lived. Jack Zimmermann will always be in Montréal, will always be on the cusp of something great - but then Kent Parson arrives and vanishes into the third bedroom and Jeff stands there uselessly, looking at the door.

 

*

 

Kent Parson brings many things to Vegas.

He brings three suitcases, like he’s not planning to go back to any of the places he came from.

He brings a lot of speed on the ice, which the team keeps talking up at every opportunity, since it was more brute force they were going for and everyone knows it. Jeff suspects that’s why they drafted him, but he’s not gonna ask.

Kent brings a signed Bad Bob poster addressed to _Kenny,_ which he pins to his door instead of framing it. Because he knows Bad Bob Zimmermann and went first in the draft and he can do shit like that.

What Jeff thinks no one notices is that he brings so much loss with him that it hangs around Kent like personal weather. 

It’s like this: in every interview before the draft, Kent was laughing. Other than that, he acts the same.

 

*

 

The year after Jeff’s mom died, he shot up four inches and switched from defense to center. He doesn’t remember much of it other than sweating in his pads and the logo on NHL.com, but when his dad got in touch with one of the coaches at SSM, it wasn’t hard to enroll him for the following fall term.

He’d been playing hockey every day already. That part wasn’t new or hard. But no one knew him, so no one knew about his mom, and he didn’t know how to explain it.

It never came up since.

He watches Parson out of the corner of his eye at Scraps’ place sometimes and thinks, _everyone knows._ It’s not pity, because Parson would face-stomp him in full gear if Jeff hinted at pity. It’s not that.

But he watches everyone else, too, and sees how no one else is seeing what Jeff does. Half of Parse’s shirts are stretched all wrong. When they carpool to the rink, Parse’s eye twitches at the music he plays in the truck he bought and hates to drive. He closes his eyes before he walks into bathrooms. Sometimes, when he’s talking to the guys on the team, he forgets to focus on their eyes and looks through them, even if his face is still making all the correct expressions.

It makes Jeff paranoid that he’s not always hitting the mark, either. That he looks like a haunted house unless he watches himself.

Coach puts them on the same line because they get along so well.

 

*

 

The thing about being like this is that it’s not something either of them can switch off, so even at home, they act like they’re friends. It can be pretty funny when it doesn’t make Jeff want to walk into the fucking desert.

If Kent doesn’t watch himself, he calls Jeff _Jack_ sometimes.

Jeff keeps track.

When Jeff can’t sleep, which is often, he reads Jack’s interviews and watches him play. He tries to see what Kent saw, but all he sees is talent and fear. Jack wasn’t funny or charming or friendly, not like Bad Bob and Alicia. He was gonna be the next Crosby, probably, but he fucking broke Kent when he died, and it wasn’t his talent that did it.

Jeff just wants to understand why Kent calls him by Jack’s name when Jeff forgets to be nice, then apologizes by letting Kent ramble about stats. He’s not even listening half the time. He’s just thinking about how Kent’s wearing Jack’s shirt and looking right through him.

He’s wondering if Jack would’ve kept Kent alive at his own expense, too.

 

*

 

Scraps likes to take them out for shit like bowling or mini golf. Jeff is way too competitive to enjoy either of those, but because Parse is equally competitive and looks more animated when he’s trying to beat Jeff, Jeff puts up with the bro dates.

“Where’d you learn to play?” he asks Kent absently on the mini golf course, the third or fourth time they go. It’s miserably hot outside and Kent is all flushed. Jeff doesn’t really mind the view, if he’s being honest.

“Oh, Bob used to take us golfing. We spent a whole month--shit, I missed,” Kent says, and doesn't finish the story.

It’s barely a story. What did they (“us,” with Kent, is him and Jack) do for a month? Golf? Is that what he did for fun when he could still have it?

Did Jack even want to be there, or was it his dad who insisted? Did he look at Kent and see him as a reason to be careful with his meds, or a reason to take more and keep up?

Kent wins. The lights behind his eyes go out again, and he talks all the way home, but he doesn’t really say anything.

 

*

 

Jeff gets called into a meeting after practice in October. The numbers are pretty fucking spectacular, his and Kent’s in particular, so he’s not that worried going in.

Turns out they want to discuss Kent’s mental state going into the season.

“Did you talk to Parson about this?” Jeff asks, caught out and quietly furious.

“We want some impressions first,” the GM says. His face is completely opaque. Jeff makes eye contact with the coaches too, and no one is saying it, but they don’t want to talk to Parse at all. They wouldn’t know how, and Parse wouldn’t admit anything even if they did. Parse’s grief can’t become a franchise problem.

Jeff makes a judgment call. He doesn’t know if it’s the right call, and he definitely wishes it hadn’t fallen on him to make it, but he twists open his water bottle, settles in, and lies his head off.

Parse has to play. He doesn’t have anything else.

 

*

 

By November, Scraps is at Mia’s place most nights. Jeff watches a lot of TV with Parse sitting next to him on the couch. Parse doesn’t get drinks for himself, but he finishes all of Jeff’s when they get warm.

He can’t hold his drink worth a damn. Awake, he’s about as inviting as a Pollock painting, but when the booze hits, he passes out on Jeff every time.

It’s safe, Jeff thinks. Comparatively. Neither of them mentions it in the morning. Parse probably doesn’t remember, and Jeff likes being needed like this, for something easy and simple. He knows he’s not actually helping, but he can’t imagine anything that would; when Parse is lying on top of him, he can almost pretend it’s normal.

And it’s better than when Parse doesn’t sleep, because when Parse is drunk and doesn’t sleep, he huddles against the opposite arm of the couch and _talks._

Jack Zimmermann loved taking pictures. He liked history and running early in the morning, when there was no one else around. He had a favorite pillowcase that he took with him on roadies, listened to country music unironically, always wore the same four shirts and two flannels, and wanted to buy a truck after the draft. He hadn’t wanted to come to Vegas because he didn’t like the idea of being surrounded by the desert. He had his panic attacks in French.

He was a good guy, and Kent Parson was in love with him, and Kent never planned anything past playing with Jack again down the line. This year, this season that’s going to define both of their careers, Kent’s whole life - it’s all off-script.

Jeff prefers it when Parse passes out, even if he likes Parse’s body against his own a little too much. Even if it’s not him that Parse is really clinging to, at least Jeff’s the right shape.

 

*

 

Bob and Alicia Zimmermann announce the launch of their mental health foundation at the All-Star Game.

Jeff watches everything from his Dad’s house, where he doesn’t have a room. There’s a TV in the guestroom, so that’s where he spends the break, trying to divine Parse’s state of mind from how hard his mask is glitching. When the Zimmermanns shepherd him onstage for the announcement, they might as well be dragging along a cardboard cut-out.

There will be specialized, discreet counseling available in every city with an NHL team. Online counseling for everyone else; of course, Jack died before he made it to the NHL.

Bob talks about the pressure he was under his entire life and how he thought that was just the way things are, until his son cracked under it. How he played through both his parents’ deaths and was expected not to show grief in post-game interviews, not to let his points slide when he was living in a haze, how it didn’t occur to him to seek help until Jack did.

How his therapist saved his life this summer, even if Jack didn’t make it.

There’s a phone number at the end.

Jeff’s fingers are numb, but he manages to type it into his phone. He pauses at the contact name, then writes _Jack_ and prays Kent won’t see it.

Kent gets another trophy.

 

*

 

They make Kent a spokesperson for the foundation. If he was doing just a little better, if he’d cracked into slightly bigger pieces, Jeff is reasonably sure that agreeing to the position would’ve helped Kent deal with his grief.

The way things actually are, Jeff is getting used to physically moving Parse from place to place with an arm around his shoulders. He’s fine once he has to do something; he just can’t do the in-between.

The worst part is that Kent starts clinging when he’s awake, too. And he talks when he’s not drunk, until Jeff thinks he and Kent are the only people who really know Jack Zimmermann.

It’s easy to know someone completely once they’re dead. Once the story is over. But Kent knew Jack like this in life, every little fold of his brain, every unflattering thing he thought about Kent and all the good stuff, too. Jack was always a complete person to him, and now he’s crystallized, and Kent has unraveled.

Jeff knows Kent because Kent gave him Jack to remember; Kent is a machine, an automaton that plays hockey and remembers Jack Zimmermann. Everyone praises his performance on both counts.

There should be a person, Jeff thinks. Someone should notice and stop this.

But there’s just Jeff, and there’s nothing he can do except steer Kent around and hope he doesn’t take him anywhere Kent can’t handle.

It’s a tightrope. Jeff can’t afford to trip.

 

*

 

Parse does a lot of events. Like, a lot. He’s being groomed for captainship next year, which is the worst thing the team could do to him, but he’s perfect on paper, so Jeff can’t do shit about it.

As his roommate, teammate, sole friend, and self-appointed keeper, Jeff goes with him to all the events. At this rate he’ll get an A when Kent gets his C. He heard some of the guys talking about the way he’s riding Parson’s shirttails and managed not to acknowledge it or yell or punch them in the face.

He’d follow Kent anywhere to keep at eye on him. Kent happens to be going up in the world. 

The hospitals they visit make Jeff’s skin crawl. He tries not to think about why that is.

He has fun when they do events with kids, when Kent is most lifelike. He thinks they both actually enjoy being on the ice for those - they used to be these kids, before they lost the people who made it enjoyable and playing hockey became just a thing they can do.

The foundation events are excruciating.

He gets it, for the record. He does. The Zimmermanns are trying to raise awareness, to give meaning to their son’s meaningless death. If he’s forgotten or written off, it could happen again, or it could almost happen a hundred times and get swept under the rug.

Seeing Kent under those big screens playing well-edited clips of Jack is Jeff’s personal hell, though, and he can’t find it in himself to give the Zimmermanns a pass for putting Kent through this.

The clips always end with a bit where Jack says, _Hey Kenny, who do you think is gonna go first?_

“He did,” Kent says once, instead of his usual speech. Jeff’s knuckles go white, but then Kent goes on with his speech, and no one notices the slip: Jack went first because Kent went nowhere.

“How do you do it?” Jeff asks him after an event. “How do you keep your shit together when they keep showing him to you?”

Kent looks at Jeff, confused. “I’d forget his voice otherwise. They only show his picture on TV.”

 

*

 

Jeff has a lot of pictures of his mom. A whole photo album in his room, which he doesn’t look at, because he knows all of them like the back of his hand.

He hadn’t realized he forgot her voice until Kent said that.

It’s like losing her all over again, and this time, he can’t afford to go numb through it. This time he has to feel it, the lack of her in every part of his life, the things she never knew about him because she was gone.

His mom is dead.

His mom--

Jeff drags himself through two more weeks of games and press ops and holding Kent together with his bare hands before he finds himself weeping, curled up in fetal position on his bed.

He makes his hand reach for the phone.

He makes his finger scroll to J.

He waits for his breath to level out, then he makes the call to _Jack._

 

*

 

It was easier to deal with Kent’s problem when Jeff was, in his new therapist’s words, repressing his own trauma. Even in the middle of it, Jeff neither drew parallels between himself and Kent, nor did it feel like he was carrying burdens of his own as well as shouldering Kent’s.

By February, his entire body aches, and he feels like an exposed nerve.

He doesn’t know how he lived that way for five years. He doesn’t know how to live like _this,_ either.

And Kent is getting worse.

His new thing is replaying the night before the draft. They might be in the middle of a team meet and Kent leans over and says, _We watched The Mighty Ducks._ Grabbing their food from a hotel breakfast buffet: _Alicia made us omelets for dinner so he could take his pills. I was too nervous to eat._

 _We stayed up until two in the morning_ as they get ready for bed.

 _He told me to get a haircut_ during a photoshoot, and Jeff feels his entire face go slack, because that’s one of the last things his mom told him, too. He’d forgotten.

About a week into this new and shitty phase, Jeff manages to put everything together.

They talked about training with Bad Bob and helped Alicia haul the laundry upstairs because the housekeeper had the day off. They watched a movie they’d seen a hundred times and talked about the other prospects. And in the early hours of the morning, which Parse never brings up, he went to the bathroom and found Jack’s body.

Jeff can’t be the second body that Parse finds. He couldn’t even off himself if he was already lying on a slab at the morgue, because he can’t be the second eulogy for a best friend that Parse has to deliver before he’s nineteen. He has to find his feet somehow.

In the meantime, he discovers that kissing Parse shuts him up. It’s less kissing than sucking the poison from a wound, but it works, so Jeff keeps doing it.

Parse lets him.

 

*

 

The first time they fuck, Parse is drunk, sprawled on top of Jeff in the living room. Jeff is trying to focus on the explosions in a movie. Parse has one arm hanging off the couch, though, and even with the explosions, Jeff can still hear the start of a disconnected number message every few seconds.

Jeff has no idea what to say. He knows Parse has been calling Jack this whole time, just to listen to his disjointed bilingual voicemail message. (Jeff _forgot his mother’s voice._ God.) He knows that Jack frequently let his phone battery drain all the way before charging it, so it didn’t hurt Parse to call and listen - he did it before the draft, too, when he couldn’t sleep and they were with their respective billet families.

Parse is shaking rhythmically, like he has to brace himself for each breath. Things keep going BOOM on the TV screen, fire everywhere, screams, 911 calls. _The number you were trying to reach--_

His therapist will politely ream him out for this, but Jeff sticks a hand down Kent’s pants anyway.

He doesn’t say _I’m here,_ because he shouldn’t be here. He’s also not surprised when Kent sobs out Jack’s name as he comes. This was a lifeline. It wasn’t about Jeff at all.

It’s what Jack would’ve done, he thinks. It’s something Kent did for Jack a lot, those last few months.

 

*

 

For the first time in his life, Jeff is prescribed medication for an insomnia episode.

Also for the first time, he stops to consider how addled he’s been by his constant exhaustion. He keeps almost falling asleep when they’re out with the team and ends up calling Ubers for everyone. He gets a reputation for being a good listener, and it’s not because he carries Jack Zimmermann like the proverbial albatross around his neck, but because he literally spaces out when guys other than Kent talk about their problems.

He has no idea who he is, if he’s being honest, but it’s unexpectedly gratifying to think of himself as a person in need of an identity. To have the clarity for that, even with the morning grogginess and the guilt for using pills in an apartment he shares with Kent.

Jeff’s lucky that the episode is pretty much done when Kent finds the pills in the medicine cabinet and locks himself in his bedroom for twelve hours.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Kent looks at it like it’s a loaded gun Jeff was holding to his own temple, and for one terrible, relieving moment, it makes Jeff consider what it would be like to pull the trigger for real. Not because things are getting worse; because things are looking up, and Jeff’s best day is a blur where he’s praised for things he does on autopilot, and the constant grueling work of holding himself together has no end in sight and goes unacknowledged.

The final piece of Jack Zimmermann clicks into place: the why of it all.

There’s a way out, and once Jack spiraled deep enough into himself to stop thinking of the living, he used the last of his energy to walk away.

Jeff gives the rest of the bottle to his therapist during their next session.

 

*

 

They keep fucking. They keep winning games. Jeff keeps dialing _Jack,_ and someone always picks up and talks him off ledges.

He does enough events with Kent for the foundation that they make Jeff an ambassador for the Aces along with Kent. By the end of the playoffs, the most he can contribute is using their branded tape for his stick, but by then he’s already used to giving speeches so Kent doesn’t have to.

It’s not hard to talk about it as long as he doesn’t make it about himself.

They win the Stanley Cup, empty their lockers, and attend the awards ceremony. Kent gets the Art Ross and the Maurice Richard. Jeff finds himself holding the Calder and, in a moment that he can only explain through sheer disbelief and power of habit, launches into a screed on mental health that is mercifully interrupted by a commercial break the third time he repeats the part about stigma.

His therapist is nearly in tears when he speed-dials her in the bathroom.

The summer stretches before them like a wasteland. Scraps moves in with his girlfriend for real. Jeff keeps sucking out the poison, makes himself hold still twice a week when it’s lanced out of him, and when Kent gets calls from Bob and Alicia, he passes the phone to Jeff before going to his room to listen to Britney ballads at deafening volume.

Jeff still hasn’t forgiven the Zimmermanns, but they listen to stories about his mom. She gave Jeff a signed Bad Bob jersey for his twelfth birthday.

When Bob says she’d be proud of Jeff, Jeff believes him.

He can’t believe he _won the fucking Calder_ on Kent Parson’s rookie year.

 

*

 

Management calls him in for a meeting at the end of July. Jeff expects it to be more of the same; they never stopped checking in with him about Kent’s mental state, and along with his foundation speeches, it’s the most familiar role in Jeff’s repertoire.

The first clue that something is different is the PR contingent in the room.

The second clue is the GM telling Jeff that the team want him for the C. _Not Kent, not Kent, not Kent,_ he thinks.

Not this final weight to break Kent’s back.

Jeff can take the weight of the team. He doesn’t know who he is, so he can build it into his new foundation, like his need for counselling and his useful, semi-healthy coping mechanisms. He can space out when he’s told secrets and still give good advice. He can keep Kent’s head in the game, keep the points rolling in; he can fill this space he’s been mapping since June of last year.

It’s a formality, but when he says yes, he means it.

 

*

 

“My career will be over by the time Jack’s soft tissues finish decomposing,” Kent says serenely when Jeff comes home and breaks the news. “I looked it up. The body’s unembalmed, in an oak coffin. My joints are gonna be worse off than his in five years.”

“Um,” Jeff says, because he’s done the Googling too. “That’s--”

“I don’t give a shit about being a captain. I’d do it if they asked, but like. As long as they’ll let me play, I’ll play. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Get some therapy?” Jeff suggests carefully. “Make friends? I have to think of the team. We’re dropping half our guys, all the vets because we swept last season and they just tagged along, and I can’t like. Do this, and do that. Kent,” Jeff says, and to his surprise, his voice isn’t breaking. Must be the shock, or the steadying weight of it all. “We all have to do our best.”

Kent watches him for a long moment, rolling up the sleeves of his too-big shirt. It feels like a ledge, but Jeff doesn’t get vertigo anymore. He waits it out. He learned how to wait.

“You sound just like him.”

“I know.”

“He would’ve liked you,” Kent says. “Not at first, but eventually. You would’ve been friends.”

“I know,” Jeff says, and steps closer to Kent.

The distance left between them would’ve been the same regardless, and it would’ve been called the same. It would’ve meant _help_ and _get a grip_ and sad songs at all hours. Jack’s call to walk away from Kent would’ve stuck, whether or not his stomach got pumped in time, and Jeff’s decision to stay would’ve meant the same, and Kent was always going to have a hole punched right through the middle and speed to make opponents sweat and a shaky, white-knuckled grip on anything that bridges the gap between who he thought he’d be and the best parts of After.

Jeff doesn’t kiss Kent. They’re standing so close that Jeff can feel the animal heat of him, but he doesn’t reach out. Not yet.

Kent reaches out first.

 

*

 

All the articles about Jeff Troy’s captainship are about Kent Parson. How he was robbed, how he’s overrated, how he found a place in the league as the Aces’ grudging first pick and proved them all wrong. How Jeff emerged as the unexpected foil to Kent’s singleminded drive and shaped a Stanley-winning team around it.

Some days, Jeff finds Kent listening to the disconnected number message. Some days, he thinks he lost his phone, then checks his recent calls and sees Jack’s name. Sometimes they talk about Jeff’s mother and Kent’s mother and how they both thought their sons would end up being the next Bad Bob, because that was the standard. Sometimes they wonder out loud, but the what-ifs lose their teeth.

A week passes. A month, a spontaneous trip to an animal shelter, a rookie camp they have nothing to do with. Jeff’s dad and his stepmom call to let him know he’ll have a sibling. They say they’re proud of Jeff. That they know it’s a lot.

“Don’t worry,” Jeff says. “I’m taking all my pills.”

Beside him, Kent shivers, but doesn’t shake apart.


End file.
